2020-2021 Labor Studies Scholarships and Prizes

Tianna Andresen, American Ethnic Studies/Education, Communities and Organizations

As a student in Education, Communities and Organizations and American Ethnic Studies, Andresen works to educate and empower students and community members through community organizing. Andresen has served as Political Chair for the Filipino American Student Association, building solidarity with other advocacy groups at the UW and in the broader Seattle community, such as ASUW’s Sexual Assault and Relationship Violence Activists, and Gabriela Seattle. She also played a role in establishing Anakbayan@UW and has worked with UW United Students Against Sweatshops to mobilize around protecting UW workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Andresen plans to continue to grow her connections within the labor community and organize in solidarity with community activist groups to continue the work of dismantling capitalism and colonialism.

Guadalupe Gonzalez 

An incoming freshman at the University of Washington, Gonzalez is dedicated to combating institutionalized oppression within his communities. Seeing how a lack of participation in the 2010 Census impacted community funding, Gonzalez organized to increase those numbers in 2020 through a fellowship with Blue Bridge, working as a Civic Promoter for the Latino Community Fund and Washington Census Alliance, and also engaged in activism with several Hispanic organizations (LULAC, WAISN, and the Tri-Cities Immigrant Coalition). He has also worked in apple orchards to support his family, and through that experience, witnessed the untenable working conditions he and other immigrant workers were made to endure. Gonzalez is passionate about working towards becoming a lawyer to help fight for immigrant rights and the rights of minority workers in the United States.

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Magdalena Lombardi 

Lombardi is an incoming student who has spent the last 20 years moving, traveling, fighting and organizing in the hope of creating a more just world. Her years in Seattle have been spent fighting for the rights of prisoners, especially to be viewed as workers and afforded their rights as such. Lombardi has been committed to social justice work her whole life, organizing with groups such as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. She intends to continue to advocate for those detained in immigration facilities, and for people languishing in poverty as COVID-19 assaults what has been deemed an “essential” workforce of BIPOC communities.

​Thomas Kaplan, School of Law

Kaplan’s dedication to the labor movement first began when he volunteered in support of the Familias Unidas unionization campaign at Sakuma Brothers Farms in 2013. Over the next four years Kaplan worked with the leaders of the campaign to advocate for farmworkers and engage Sakuma in a lawsuit that resulted in a $850,000 for 1,200 workers. Kaplan’s experience working with immigrants and farmworkers as part of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, following the unionization campaign, went to influence other aspects of his education and activism, and he is dedicated to building legal knowledge as a tool in fighting for social justice and fair working conditions.

​Luis Sanchez Arias, School of Social Work

An incoming Master’s student, Sanchez Arias is working towards social justice and building support and community accessibility within the system of healthcare. Surviving through a serious injury in childhood, Sanchez Arias made the move to the United States alone from El Salvador at age 14, after receiving poor medical treatment that worsened his injury. His arrival in the United States revealed more flaws within the United States healthcare system - particularly a lack of accessibility for those who were unable to speak fluent English, and inspired his path towards Social Work, to support others in his community that also struggle to gain access. As an immigrant, and coming from a family of farmworkers, Luis is also passionate about advocating for the rights of farmworkers and undocumented people whose labor often goes unrecognized as they face daily discrimination.

Yuanjin Zhou, School of Social Work

As a first generation immigrant from China and PhD candidate, Zhou’s experiences and observations around institutionalized care for elders has informed her research and pursuit of knowledge and conversation around caring labor on a transnational level. Zhou’s research aims to develop interventions and inform policies to empower dementia caregivers in managing their own health and wellbeing as well as that of those they care for. Her research agenda addresses aging, disability, and caregiving as social justice issues by examining bio-psycho-social factors and mechanisms that impact people’s experiences of aging, being disabled, and caregiving.

Yingyi Wang, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies

Yingyi Wang is a queer, Hakka Chinese, woman with a deep history of labor activism at the University of Washington (active in campus union organizing), the Greater Seattle Community, and internationally (Pacific Rim Solidarity Network). As a PhD candidate, Wang’s research project seeks to understand how the precarious resistance of NGO workers in China is simultaneously limited by and facilitated by the intersection between the authoritarian state, neoliberal market economy and transnational NGO industry. Investigating feminist and LGBT NGOs, her research bridges the gap between scholarship on NGO organization in civil society, labor studies focused on productive labor and labor resistance, and feminist studies of social reproduction and affect, to understand gendered labor as a form of precarious resistance.

​Maria Soto, School of Social Work

A Masters student, Soto comes from a humble, hardworking family of six that immigrated to Washington State more than fifteen years ago to work the agricultural fields of the Yakima Valley. In working alongside her family and other farmworkers in the Valley, Soto witnessed the lack of support, discrimination, and hazardous working conditions they faced on a regular basis. As a first-generation undocumented student, she hopes to use her education to aid the effort of reforming occupational safety policies for farmworkers in the Yakima Valley.

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Jey Saung, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies 

An award-winning instructor, Saung’s PhD research on reproductive technologies and queer kinship seeks to complicate current understandings of reproductive labor, and brings together the fields of science and technology studies, queer studies, family studies and labor studies. Saung’s experiences as an immigrant from Taiwan, growing up in an intergenerational household under the conditions of financial insecurity, as well as their continuously growing experiences organizing for social justice and in the labor movement have helped to define and shape their activities both in and outside the University of Washington.

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John McClung, Infrastructure, Planning and Management 

John McClung, an incoming graduate student, grew up in a large, working-class mixed Filipino family.  As an undergraduate, he was awarded grant funding to conduct independent research in the Philippines, working with indigenous farmers in the Philippine highlands and exploring community leadership structures, as well as in Seattle’s Filipino-American communities, observing the traditional knowledge and cultural practices maintained within. McClung has served and organized for over 25 years, and currently is a full-time UW Custodian and a shop steward for WFSE/AFSCME 28, Local 1488. He has worked on the front lines, building solidarity amongst fellow workers, uplifting worker-power, and fighting for better conditions for custodians at the UW and in solidarity with workers across Seattle.

Clara Lemme Ribeiro, Geography

Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Lemme Ribeiro is an incoming PhD student interested in labor, gender, migration and social reproduction. Ribeiro extensively studied Bolivian sweatshop workers and their families across Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina for her undergraduate and Masters degrees, and served as a consultant to the Alinha Institute, a Brazilian NGO dedicated to improving labor conditions in the country’s garment industry.

Ramses Llobet, Political Science

An international student hailing from Spain, Llobet is pursuing a PhD and plans to study how political institutions like banks, wage bargaining systems, and labor unions shape national economies, particularly economic inequalities and labor markets. His Masters research at the University of Essex compared eighteen different countries between 1985 to 2015 to determine the relationship between wage bargaining and inequalities between workers.

Yuying Xie, Geography

As an undergraduate student in Nanjing, China, Xie became interested in labor, gender, and workplace exploitation as a volunteer providing legal support and services to rural migrant workers in construction and manufacturing industries. For her Masters degree, completed at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Xie studied the emotional labor of female migrant workers in China working in the service industry. As a PhD student, Xie seeks to study gender inequality, race, and workplace politics in the increasingly marketized language teaching industry in China.

Best Graduate Paper: Frances O’Shaughnessy

Black Revolution in the Sea Islands: Empire, Property, and the Emancipation of Land and Labour, 1861-1863

In a paper based on research for their History PhD dissertation, O’Shaughnessy discusses how the Gullah people of the Southeastern United States practiced collective emancipation during the Civil War, challenging the status of land and labor as property.

Best Undergraduate Paper: Jourdan Marshall

Employing Racism: Black Miners, the Knights of Labor, and Company Tactics in the Coal Towns of Washington

Marshall's essay, now a part of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, tells the story of how race and racism were leveraged in the conflicts between the Knights of Labor and the Oregon Improvement Company in late nineteenth century Washington State. This important and timely work sheds a light on the first labor conflict in Washington involving African Americans, and on how capital has historically invoked racial tensions to its benefit.

Aliyah Musaliar

Class and Caste within the South Asian Diaspora in the United States

Musaliar’s video explores the persistence of caste within South Asian communities in the United States, the relationship of caste to issues of class, race and nationality, and the reinforcement of caste through U.S. immigration policy across the twentieth century.

Jordan Naini

A History of Labor Union Music

Exploring the role played by music in labor movements in the twentieth century United States, Naini’s video follows the history of folk songs from the Great Depression of the 1930s through the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Greta DuBois

Organized Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement

DuBois’ paper charts the struggles of Chinese workers in the U.S. West during the late nineteenth century, and recounts how they were targeted by racist campaigns led by organized labor, particularly the powerful Knights of Labor.

Noelle Morrison

Ernesto Mangaoang and the Right to Be: The Fight for Filipino-American Belonging in the United States

Morrison’s essay, published on the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, details the story of Filipino cannery worker turned radical labor leader Ernesto Mangaoang and his legal struggles against deportation, which ultimately secured rights for thousands of Filipino immigrants to the United States. 

Carrie Freshour

Freshour received her PhD from Cornell University in 2018. Her PhD work has been committed to exploring issues related to labor and specifically its relationship with “racial capitalism.” Her doctoral thesis looked at the making of poultry workers in the US South. She has also completed research projects on the United Packinghouse Workers of America and is interested in the intersections of the state, economy and society and the international and comparative study of labor. Freshour’s teaching interests are also deeply connected to labor, ranging from the history of labor movements to that of food work and workers. She is also an activist and has been involved in several initiatives based around women, minority rights and food justice.

P. Joshua Griffin

P. Joshua Griffin is an environmental anthropologist working at the intersections of Indigenous studies, political ecology, critical social science, and climate change. His community-engaged research focuses on Arctic Indigenous ecologies, climate change, environmental health, food sovereignty, hunting and fishing governance/rights, and environmental planning. More broadly, he is interested in approaches to "climate adaptation" that center Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination; participatory digital methods to support Indigenous environmental history, cultural heritage and planning; coastal dynamics, sea level rise, and climate-induced migration; and social movements for environmental and climate justice, including faith-based movements. Professor Griffin is jointly appointed in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs.

Kari Lerum

Kari Lerum is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences and Cultural Studies at University of Washington Bothell, and Adjunct Faculty in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at University of Washington Seattle. Her scholarship centers on the critical study of social inequality, focusing on the intersections of sexuality, institutions, and culture. She teaches courses in the topics of inequality, media, research methods, sexuality, and sex work. Her articles have appeared in a number of sociology and sexuality related journals and edited volumes.

Megan Ybarra

Megan Ybarra is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she teaches courses including Race/Nature/Power, Environmental Justice and Cultural Geographies of Latin America. Prior to this appointment, she was an assistant professor of Politics at Willamette University. Her current research examines settler colonialism, violence and land activism in Guatemala’s Maya Forest. She is developing a new research project on immigrant justice and transnational Latinidades.

Labor Archives of Washington

The Labor Archives of Washington (LAW) was founded in 2010 to preserve the records of working people and their unions and to serve as a center for historical research, ensuring that new generations have access to the rich labor history of the region. It contains more than 300  collections of labor and labor-related materials from individuals and organizations. These collections document the local, national, and international dimensions of the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest. Collections document the intersection between labor unions and social justice, civil rights, and political organizations that feature a labor relations or labor rights as part of their focus.